


The Beginning, The End, The Whole Shebang

by Accidentallytechohazardous



Category: Bleach
Genre: Child Death, Gen, Homelessness, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 09:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7970869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidentallytechohazardous/pseuds/Accidentallytechohazardous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of Lisa Yadomaru in three parts: </p>
<p>The Past: Lisa sits up and picks grass seeds out of her dark hair, come loose to hang around her neck and shoulders. What does it mean when you are dead but not at peace? </p>
<p>The Present: Ichigo doesn’t usually get the opportunity to voice his own opinion, and Lisa has a feeling she’ll regret opening that door.</p>
<p>The Future: Yeah, no- who the fuck goes from being an exile to selling sex toys and other adult paraphernalia to being a captain of the same military organization she was exiled from? Her life is one weird sitcom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Beginning, The End, The Whole Shebang

At age fourteen, Lisa Yadomaru is very nearly the perfect heir. No matter how vexing she is to her parents, even they have to admit she’s a fantastic asset to have.  
  


Lisa is cunning, intelligent, and athletic. Sure, she’s on the slimmer side for most boys her age, and has this delicate air about her that draws unpleasant conversations about her behind closed doors, but she’s still strong. It’s normal for young men to be a little peculiar at that age, especially when they’re so quiet and shy.  
  


She doesn’t create any trouble or act out, she takes everything thrown at her in stride. She doesn’t mind that everyone thinks she’s a boy. She’s even okay with her parents planning her marriage to a nice girl, knowing that the son of a moderately successful textile manufacturer out in the country is far from the worst thing to be wedded to. Lisa recognizes it’s not a bad life. It’s just not really _her’s_.  
  


At age fourteen, Lisa Yadomaru has no friends. Nobody she can confide in. People more often are repelled by her difficult personality, the attitude she doesn’t know how to not have. Cold and distant and off-putting. Lisa gets high marks in school, does well in sports, and respects her elders. Everyone, her parents and her teachers and her peers, all think she’s a great example.  
  


But none of them actually _like_ her.  
  


At weird times, Lisa wonders what would happen if she disappeared. If she could slip through the gap between time and space. Oblivion scares her, looking upwards at the sky and feeling awfully small and strange. But if she could close her eyes and, in a moment, wake up somewhere else. What would that be like?  
  


She’d later wish it was that easy, and frankly Lisa proposes that the younger her is an idiot for thinking for even a second that anything was that goddamn simple in her life.  
  


She remembers the pain. At the doctors, they tell you to rate your pain from one to ten. One is, like, a slight sting, and ten is when you’re about to pass out from the sheer agony of it all. Lisa counts the earthquake that crushed her spine and brought the house on top of her head as a solid five hundred out of ten. Definitely not recommended for beginners. At least it was quick, which is the least depressing thing one can say about their own death.  
  


(There are other things. The terrifying blackness that was all that could be seen under layers and layers of crumbling wood and stone. The involuntary feeling of a body being rendered useless, like a broken doll. Of waiting for a family, for mother or father or anyone to come. Of the several airless moments before fading away. Incredibly, painfully, eternally long moments. It was quick. But quick is a subjective word. To a fly, a millisecond goes by like years.)  
  


Soul Society does Lisa the honor of greeting her with her back slamming into the grass. The yukata she died in still covered in dust and with grit between the folds, and it doesn’t seem like real life. Nothing does, frankly, when one moment you are crushed to death under a hundred tons of your own house and the next you’re a ghost. But she thought the afterlife would be scarier. A void. A black hole.  
  


Not the sunshine on her face, filtering between her fingers when she holds her palm up to the blue sky. A ladybug crawls over the bottom of her bare foot. She isn’t in any pain, nor any discomfort aside from the bruise on the back of her head from a rough landing. Lisa sits up and picks grass seeds out of her dark hair, come loose to hang around her neck and shoulders. What does it mean when you are dead but not at peace?  
  


She walks into town that way, the soles of her feet black with mud and nettles clinging to her clothes. With wind skating over her skin and thoroughly disheveled, trying to weave her way through clusters of strangers in a village where she recognizes no one and no one recognizes her. Lisa is used to being ignored, and she easily ducks underneath a long pillar of wood being swung over somebody’s shoulder. It offers her only more opportunity to observe in fascination. There are hundreds of people around her, speaking in different languages and wearing clothes from different countries. How different it is from her small town. How jarring to be a big fish taken out of a small pond.  
  


There is a free-standing water spigot in town, one that invites Lisa to sit on her knees. The cold water runs down her hands and up her sleeves, peels away layers of dirt and cement from her face as Lisa tries to rub the smell of death out of her skin. Sharp thumbs massage circles over her eyes, popping colors behind her lids as Lisa tries to decipher what is real. It suddenly occurs to Lisa that she is tired, and hungry, and has no idea where to go from here, which is all rather concerning.  
  


A voice rouses Lisa from her anxious tidings, sounding old and worn like leather. “Young man.”  
  


That’s right. Lisa is dressed like a boy. Looks like a boy, whatever that means. She looks upwards at an old woman wielding a rusty bucket and takes a minute to collect her courage before plainly correcting. “I’m a girl.” It’s something she’s said plenty of times before, but this is the first time it’s out loud.  
  


The lady smiles apologetically, with the kind of tightness in the lines of her wrinkled face saying that she doesn’t care, but is too polite to say so. “My apologies. Young lady, would you please move?”  
  


It’s not the most admirable of ways to hear one’s gender repeated back to them for the first time, but it’s about the highlight of Lisa’s first day in Soul Society.  
  


Evening finds Lisa sleeping on someone’s porch. She’s still hungry and her feet still hurt. Her clothes smell like the home that ironically killed her and she can’t decide how she feels about that. She is fourteen and she doesn’t yet know that she is going to sleep on many porches, and she’ll be hungry and sore plenty of times. But the first night, Lisa stares up at the sky with her head laid on some stranger’s door stoop, and decides that maybe she can make this work. Maybe things are gonna be okay anyways.  
  


One year later, she hears about the academy for shinigami.

 

* * *

 

“She’s not even paying attention!”  
  


“Yes, I am.” Lisa answers flatly. Her eyes roll idly over the supple figure of a rakishly dressed lady clad in only a sheer nightgown. “I’m paying attention to how much you suck.”  
  


Lisa does a very good job of not thinking about how long it’s been since she’s had sex, or even had a moment alone to herself. The commotion around this place has taken an annoyingly exponential increase.    
  


She hears Hachigen’s voice, weary with a sigh and never-ending well of patience, say “Shinji.” with intended meaning. Lisa doesn’t need to look up to see their so-called leader giving Hachigen a look of faux-surprise, his mouth gaping open comically as if he can’t even begin to imagine he would be called on to mediate  
  


“What? Ichigo said he didn’t wanna train with Hiyori today, so I had her go out an’ do the shopping!”  
  


“This isn’t training! It’s barely even exercise!”  
  


Lisa tears her eyes away from legs that she could climb for the much less alluring sight of Ichigo’s face turning the color of cranberries, sweating and scowling with Hiyori’s shitty sparring gear strapped to his arms and legs. Leaning against the far cement wall, Kensei’s old punching bag slouches onto the floor, leaking it’s foam stuffing and looking thoroughly abused.  
  


Over the irritated muttering of Love, (“Aww, man. Did you break that again? I’m not putting that thing back up.) Lisa can see Ichigo’s teenagery glare turned in her direction pointedly. The expression he gives her isn’t exactly a flattering one, more like she is another boring adult in his life that can’t possibly understand the complexities of what he’s going through. Oh, irony, you cruel and hilarious mistress.  
  


Regretfully, Lisa slaps her magazine closed. She had been leaning on the back two legs of the chair, now allowing them to fall full-force onto the floor that she could uncross and re-cross her legs. Lisa manages to give the kid a look that’s only mildly cranky through her glasses as she lies the magazine out of her lap and growls, “What?”  
  


To Lisa’s credit, Ichigo looks a little abashed by that. Hiyori and Shinji train him the most, due to their unique energy and the rest of the Visoreds’ utter lack of interest in such a thankless chore. He doesn’t usually get the opportunity to voice his own opinion, and Lisa has a feeling she’ll soon regret opening that door.  
  


Sure enough. “What am I supposed to be doing here? First it was that fake ‘Hiyori Super-Trainer Deluxe’ or whatever it was called, now I’m just punching a bag around? This one doesn’t even drain my reiatsu. I don’t have time for this, I’ve gotta be training to control my hollow!”  
  


He even manages to look both angry and sulky, like a puppy put outside for getting in the garbage. Lisa resists the urge to state the obvious, or hold her head in her hands until this headache called her waking life subsides.  
  


Instead, she pushes her glasses up on her index and middle finger and wills herself to be calm. She never was the most patient with trainees. Kyoraku was always the carrot, motivating his troops with gentle ease and playful jibing. That left her to be the stick, and God help anybody who tried to play games with stone-faced, super-creep Lieutenant Yadomaru.  
  


Obviously, that was a long time ago. Cue wistfully gazing out across the ocean to a time before everything in her life went tits-up.  
  


“You’re too dangerous.” Lisa admits. She feels the fading soreness of yellow-green bruises on her arms and thighs from their first attempt to bring out Ichigo’s inner hollow. The line of bloody red that Hachigen shrank into a white line carving over her ribs. “If we try to bring out your hollow now, it will resist. Or worse, be even harder to take down with your physical body at full health. But the hollow might instinctively be easier to call out when you’re tired, kind of like an adrenaline rush. At the very least, it means we won’t have to waste as much time beating the crap out of ya’ when you manage to screw up.”  
  


Ichigo’s eyes lose some of their fire, and for the first time she notices how brown they are. Brown and young, the eyes of a boy. He looks down at his fists and seems to contemplate what he has to do, and Lisa doesn’t have to be a mind-reader to know he’s wondering what it would be like. To lose himself, and get consumed by the monster inside.  
  


Lisa’s hollow is not an ally, or a tool. It is, at it’s most useful, a weapon, and after that it’s a pain in the ass. It’s a constant thorn in her flesh, a cold and uneasy prickle of fear going from the base of her brain down her spine, like cold water dripping down her neck. It sits in her skull like the world’s shittiest roommate, eating away at Lisa’s energy and patience and not even paying rent.  
  


The only good thing it ever does is offer Lisa power. And sometimes she says yes. But then it offers, again and again, and each time Lisa wonders how many more times she can say yes before she loses the power to say “No.” It offers. She declines. It offers. She hesitates. It offers. She screams at it to leave her alone. It offers.  
  


It is a white, spiky, hungry, cold, angry _Thing_. It is a part of her. It is inside of her. It is her.  
  


Lisa narrows her eyes at Ichigo over the brim of her Nude Beach Babes Quarterly, and tries to imagine a life for him like the one the rest of them have now. If Shinji’s plan to indoctrinate him should work, god forbid, and Lisa has to one day call Ichigo a member of her “family.”  
  


She imagines this young man- this child, being forced to leave behind his shinigami allies, turn his back on Soul Society all together. To leave his human friends and family, his future and his world to live in this leaky storage warehouse for all eternity.  
  


To be exactly like them.  
  


Kensei’s voice smashes through her thoughts like so many sledgehammers, and Lisa releases a breath she didn’t even realize she had been holding in. “Lunch’s ready! Get your butts in gear before the meat gets cold!”  
  


The sound and the smells of the usual afternoon clammer are so eerily familiar. A hundred years of constant companionship. A hundred years of eating Kensei’s cooking, of waiting for Hiyori and Mashiro to come back from shopping. Of them bringing Rose his manga and his subsequent whining when Love spoils the entire issue for him. Of Hachigen trying to peacefully resolve the bickering while Shinji attempts to dodge the chaos in order to cut to the front of the line.  
  


Lisa’s red sneakers are rooted to the ground. She feels so far away but so very here, like she’s experiencing the last handful of decades all at once, flipping over each other like pages in a book. There is a feeling that rises in her chest, and she doesn’t know if it is warmth or a gaping hole. But it hurts. It hurts so much but feels so much better than pain or the absence of pain.  
  


She finds herself falling behind. Her magazine in one hand and the top of her sailor uniform sitting crookedly on her shoulders. Lisa of all people, who gets her kicks out of making people uncomfortable and watches the world go by from the top of her erotic manga, feels affection like a fist around her heart.  
  


Ichigo, banished to the back of the line, notices her first, but only gives her a funny look. Lisa doesn’t remember offering to lend him her magazine in the last five minutes. Mashiro notices next, pausing with her arms wrapped around Kensei’s bicep in the middle of badgering him for sweets.  
  


“Lisa, are you okay?”  
  


Suddenly eight pairs of eyes are on her, and she can’t breathe. Lisa’s vision swims and she realizes her eyes are watering. How horrifyingly unlike her. Lisa never does this. Lisa never gets emotional.  
  


Lisa never had a family like this before. After losing the Eighth. Never had people who accepted her, pervy quirks and irritable temper and her own annoying weaknesses. Never had a group of people who picked her up at her lowest and gave her a home. They’re a part of her. They are her.  
  


She comes back to herself, schooling her expression into a mask of apathy that comes so naturally to her after centuries of practice. “My glasses.” She hears herself explain while plucking her eyewear of her nose and looking down to polish an imaginary speck on the lens with her shirt.  
  


Lisa all but shoves her glasses into her own ear, slamming them back on her face and muscling past Ichigo and shouldering a squawking Hiyori to the front of the food line.  
  
The hubbub rises around Lisa almost as quickly as it dissipated, a catastrophe of noisy arguing. Lisa, strategist that she is, doesn’t risk looking up from the ground as Kensei scoops stir fry into her bowl. He surprises her by setting his hand down, heavy and strong and familiar, to squeeze her shoulder a little too tightly.

 

* * *

 

The Eighth Division is rich with nothing if not flowers. It’s hard to remember if the tradition surpases Shunsui Kyoraku or simply began with him, because as far as any officer can remember there have been luscious bushes ringing around every building on the squad grounds that blossom with delicate white and pink bulbs. There are orchids and lilies that leap from the ground in fantastic colors. There are purple petals shaped like stars that cover the crooked arms of black-barked trees, looming over the windows like they’re trying to crawl inside. Opening the windows is like breathing in a particularly powerful and floral perfume.  
  


Lisa is still brushing cherry blossom petals off of her chair and desk, shuffling over them as she balances a box of meager belongings on her hip. There wasn’t that much she was able to bring back from the World of the Living, anyways. She left most of her stuff with Hiyori and Hachigen. She put Love in charge of her shop. She’s pretty sure that was a good idea.  
  


The haori feels too goddamn big on her. Lisa isn’t an especially small woman, but she’s drowning in the fabric. Misses her short skirts and borderline-vulgar costumes. (surprising- considering how open humans were nowadays, for some reason not everyone was cool with a thirty-year-old-woman wearing a sailor uniform.) She misses that she could hide in plain sight, but by just being herself.  
  


No big loss, she decides as she folds her arms and balances her hip against the side of her desk, observing her mostly empty office. People will be talking, anyways. The spotless white haori covers her like a shield, draping over her shoulders and arms with an unfamiliar weight. She pushes up her glasses up her nose and is alone with her thoughts and the smells of the flowers.  
  


She should talk to someone. God knows, Lisa has only spent most of her career in the shadows. Doing Kyoraku’s dirty work. And then, hiding for a century and flitting from odd job to odd job like any oddball kicked out on the street. A shop clerk. A magazine sales rep. An online CD supplier. A shinigami again, finally, like a rotten tooth she can’t yank out.  
  


Yeah, no- who the fuck goes from being an exile to selling sex toys and other adult paraphernalia to being a captain of the same military organization she was exiled from? Her life is one weird sitcom.  
  


It occurs to Lisa that in all of those years, in all of that lengthy and bizarre experience she’s collected, she has no goddamn clue how to be a leader.  
  


She should call somebody. Hiyori? No. Hiyori is always good for a vent, but she’s not much of a listener. She probably doesn’t wanna talk to Lisa any time soon, either, for taking this job. Lisa doesn’t blame her. Nor Hachi and Love. Not yet, anyways.  
  


That leaves her with the Big Four. The original sell-outs before Lisa joined the herd, which is pretty hysterical and ironic, right? She could talk to Shinji, and get some cryptic advice. Rose, for some dramatic and cryptic advice. Kensei, for some reluctant and cryptic advice. Mashiro, for cryptic… something or other.  
  


Lisa pinches the bridge of her nose between her finger and her thumb. This sucks.  
  


At least she can see Nanao, more. Even as Lisa misses the little girl who used to follow her around, and asked the Big Weird Gay Pervert Lieutenant Yadomaru to read to her, like that was a thing to do. The older, bigger Nanao doesn’t seem so bad either.  
  


She can talk to Kyoraku.

  
As if he didn’t have the chance to talk to her before. You know, during the hundred years she was in exile.  
  


Did he even look for her? In all that time? Did he wonder where she was? Did he do everything he could have to find a cure?  
  


Is he going to try and pretend it’s all fine now that she’s back, as if the last hundred years never happened?  
  


No, let’s not talk to Kyoraku.  
  


Lisa looks again at her office. Mostly empty. Reddish-brown tones. Rose-colored accents. Lisa prefers blue, and Kyoraku should know that. She drops her box down on the glossy surface, the well-polished wood that some underling was forced to scrub spotless for her arrival.  
  


She slumps into her chair- her fucking captain’s chair at her captain’s desk in her captain’s office, goddammit- and kicks her feet up and cracks open a swimsuit magazine. Miss August greets Lisa’s eyes as cheerfully as anything in the whole world could, the only thing faker than her flawless, bountiful silicone breast is her brilliant white grin.  
  


It’s all new, but feels oddly familiar. Lisa can at least hope it’s not for some cliche bullshit reason, like she belongs here or something. That would be too much.


End file.
